Chapter Twenty-Seven — The Coffin #2
The poison burned through her veins like grief given life.
And beneath it something else.
Longing.
The unbearable aching need to touch him one last time.
Avery looked toward Vinny’s body helplessly.
“I never got to say goodbye.”
Blaine’s expression shifted instantly.
There.
Pain.
Not for himself.
For her.
Tunnel alarms screamed overhead while Silas carved through House enforcers in the
background like some elegant nightmare drowned in blood.
None of it mattered.
Only Vinny.
Only goodbye.
Blaine followed her gaze slowly toward the coffin.
Then back to her face.
Understanding hit him all at once.
“No,” he said quietly.
Avery’s throat tightened.
“I need to.”
“If you touch him—”
“I know.”
Death.
Poison.
Contamination.
Maybe worse.
Avery knew.
But Vinny died believing she feared him more than losing him.
And she couldn’t let that become true forever.
Tears blurred her vision completely now.
“I just want him to know I loved him too.”
Silence swallowed the tunnel.
Even Blaine looked shattered by that sentence.
Then softly carefully he said the most dangerous thing yet.
“Then I’ll hold you.”
Avery stared at him.
Blaine stepped closer despite the poison thickening dangerously in the air around her.
Silver eyes locked onto hers steadily.
No fear.
Never fear.
“If it spreads,” he said quietly, “I’ll stop it.”
The House soldiers were screaming.
Tunnel lights were dying.
Silas was laughing somewhere through the gunfire.
But Avery could only hear Blaine offering to hold her together while she touched death. #
The Weight of His Name
Avery woke to the sound of Blaine cleaning a weapon.
She hadn’t meant to sleep.
The safehouse cot smelled like antiseptic and old metal and the faint residue of poison
flowers — the belladonna blossom from before, resting now in a cracked water glass on the
cabinet beside her.
Still alive.
She lay still for a moment listening to the precise rhythmic sound of him working.
Strip.
Check.
Reassemble.
There was something almost meditative about it. She’d noticed this about Blaine — the way
repetitive tasks gave him somewhere to be inside himself. Quiet without emptiness.
Present without vulnerability.
She watched him from the cot.
He sat at the mission table with his back three-quarters toward her, dark head bent over
the disassembled firearm, sleeves rolled to the elbow. The industrial light caught the pale
scars along his wrists and forearms.
Black veins fading.
Still visible.
Still hers.
The thought arrived so quietly she almost didn’t notice it.
Then she did.
And it froze her.
Still hers.
As if some part of her had quietly started thinking about the damage she caused like a
ledger she maintained. Blaine’s veins on her side of the column.
Hers.
She pushed herself upright too fast. The motion made the room swim.
Blaine looked up immediately.
“You’re awake.”
“Don’t.”
He blinked once.
“Don’t what?”
“Notice things so fast. It’s unsettling.”
A beat of quiet.
“Alright.”
She poured water from the cabinet into a clean glass and stared at it.
She could feel him not-staring at her from the table. The specific consideration of someone
deciding whether to speak.
She already hated that she could read him.
“Avery.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not shaking like you’re fine.”
She set the glass down.
Her hands were shaking. Small and persistent and impossible to stop.
Not the poison.
Just her.
She heard the table creak as Blaine stood. Heard him cross toward her with the deliberate
unhurried steps he used when he didn’t want to startle.
He stopped somewhere behind her.
Close enough to feel. Not close enough to touch.
Always exactly that.
“How long was I asleep?” she asked.
“Four hours.”
Four hours.
She thought about eleven days since Vinny died.
She thought about the first week, when she’d barely slept at all. When grief was so present
and physical it felt like something growing inside her chest crowding out everything else.
She thought about when it had started to shift. Becoming something she carried rather than
something that carried her.
She thought about what had been happening simultaneously during that shift.
The flowers.
The way he grounded her when the poison surged.
The bare hand in the tunnel catching her when she fell.
The coffin.
Her.
His bare skin against her jaw in the apartment dark.
Avery laughed once under her breath, short and strange.
Blaine waited.
“I keep thinking,” she said finally.
He waited.
“That the people who love me—” Her voice came out uneven. “Something always happens
to them.”
The room went very quiet.
“I know it isn’t—” She stopped. Started again. “I know you’d say the city is what kills
people. That caring about me doesn’t make someone a target, not by itself—”
“Avery.”
“I know that.”
“I know you know that.”
She looked at him.
At the scars.
The careful distance.
The weapon on the table behind him.
“I don’t know how to want something,” she whispered, “without being terrified of what it
costs.”
Silence stretched.
Blaine crossed toward her slowly.
He stopped within arm’s reach.
“The costs are always real,” he said quietly.
Not comfort exactly.
Not false reassurance.
Just honesty.
“Yes,” she said.
“And choosing not to want things doesn’t stop the cost.”
The words hit somewhere tender.
Because she already knew this.
Vinny had been careful too. At the beginning. She remembered the months when he visited
the café and chose the corner table and set his hands near hers without quite touching.
All that careful not-wanting.
All that cost anyway.
She laughed once under her breath. Small. Broken.
Blaine watched the sound appear like he’d won something important without trying.
That was the problem.
That was the whole problem.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said finally.
Blaine’s expression stayed carefully neutral.
“Okay.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Okay.”
“That might not change.”
“Avery.” His voice was quiet. “I’m not asking you to be ready.”
The simplicity of it nearly destroyed her.
Because nobody had ever just —
Stayed within the uncertainty.
Not without asking for something in return.
Avery looked toward the belladonna blossom in the cracked water glass.
Poison flower surviving in a safehouse under a dead chapel in the middle of a crumbling
city.
Ridiculous.
Inevitable.
Still alive.
“Okay,” she said finally.
And Blaine went back to the table and she went back to the cot, and the city burned softly
outside, and neither of them said anything else.
But the distance between them felt different after that.
Not smaller.
Just chosen.